Rereading Maggio's email, I see that she doesn't say that Depaulis dated the Catania to 1445 (much less 1435). She said, after mentioning both the Catania and the ChVI (but the latter last) she said "it has been dated to 1445", and I jumped to the wrgong conclusion. Rereading, I think it is the Charles VI she was referring to, and it is she who dated it so, in her 2016 article. Thanks for catching that. Added later: There is nothing in her email about anyone dating the Catania to 1445. I thought I heard that date mentioned in the presentation, but I am now unsure if anyone said it about the Catania.
About Cohen: One problem of relying on her is that there isn't much surviving depiction of time before 1450 in Florence anyway, a mere handful, 4 manuscripts and 2 cassoni (p. 303). We have no idea what is lost, especially in cassoni.
She says that even up to the 1480s it was the man holding the sphere that predominated (304):
These Florentine illustrations created before 1450 provided the dominant prototype for the subsequent iconography of the Trionfo del Tempo until about 1480, and in some cases long after.
In the next decade, she says that there is only one cassone with Time on it, which is the one with the hourglass (311, pictured 312), and a series of manuscript illuminations; she shows us one from 1456 (although I can't find the hourglass) and another from 1459.
Approximately one-fifth of the extant Trionfi manuscripts belong to the decade between 1450 and 1460. With the exception of three from northern Italy, the illuminations are all Florentine.'~ The scene of the Trionfo del Tempo is found on only one Florentine cassone during this period. The fact that the Trionfo del Tempo was not always included in the Trionfi series on cassoni, as attested by several fragments assigned to this decade, can probably be attributed to their function as marriage chests.
I think she is referring to a series by Scheggia, which sometimes is dated to the 1440s. These dates are very fluid. The artist closest in style to the Catania, I think, is in fact Scheggia, who did cassone fragments of Love, Death, Fame, and Eternity, but not Time as well as the cassone lid similar to the Stag-rider.
It would seem, from Giusti document of 1440, that the cards came first and then the fashion for illustrated Petrarchan Triumphs (I did a pretty thorough search a few years ago, hardly any datable before 1440). Surely the Old Man or Hunchback was among the cards of c. 1438-1440. Do you think the cards of that time would have had him holding a sphere, then changed it to an hourglass? 1450 is when the game was legalized, so that its imagery could be more legitimately represented in places that confer status, like mss. and cassoni. So the hourglass could reasonably go from the cards, all or most of which are lost, to other media.
Added: If the cards had the hourglass in 1440, how do we account for the sphere in the cassoni and manuscript illuminations of the early 1440s? The latter were done by different people, drawing on medieval tradition -and Petrarch's cosmic time, defeating Fame over eons - to meet the new demand (small at first) for Petrarch illustrations. The cards took the other aspect of Petrarchan Time, that of the brevity of life (Cohen p. 302), symbolized by the hourglass, and it wasn't until 1450 that they finally made an impact on other media.
Added: by "Cohen" I mean
Renaissance Studies Vol. 14 No. 3 , "The early Renaissance personification of Time and
changing concepts of temporality", by S. Cohen, which I think is in JSTOR.